AFAIK the minimum was about 50 (a good deal of the bigger cinemas have that many (generally about 10 larger speakers at the sides with a great number of small ones around and between them) even if they can't be controlled independently.)
Now despite having that many speakers you still have the sweet spot problem and that's where the wave field synthesis comes in. You replicate the real wave field of a sound (or emulate a bigger distance between the 5,6,7 channels you have today for a WFS-for-the-poor) and therefore it's just like if the helicopter crashed really 10 feet in front of you because the sound waves of such a hypothetical crash are simulated perfectly. The people at the left won't think it crashed on their left because the left speakers had some small echo but they're so much closer to that speakers, no they'll still think it crashed in front of them because of WFS. The more speakers you have the closer the sweet spot extends to the walls before you leave the simulated wave field.
You make good points. However, it is important to note that the US legal system is based on Case Law (rulings and findings from similar cases). It is not appropriate for Judges/legal counsel to be using decisions from other countries in providing the legal basis for a case or decision.
erm, especially because precedent is so important in the US legal system it makes sense to look whether there've been similar cases elsewhere and if their findings are valid and applicable in the US
The US legal system is quite unique in the world. Europe has turned into a collection of Social Democracies. The US has a Constitution built on individual, not social rights and responsibilities
This has absolutely nothing to do with this case.
Clearly these two are at odds and provide the very framework of our respective legal systems.
No they don't. The weak social security framework in the US has no impact on copyright law. Actually it has no impact whatsoever on most aspects of the legal system. The most important difference between common law and code napoleon style law is that a man with a red flag has to walk in front of a car driven by a woman in portland (or somewhere else, don't remember).
Testing users who never sat in front of a PC before was valid 10 years ago. Today almost everyone is using a PC at least sporadically and in most cases that means Windows.
While having people from different backgrounds makes sense if you limit yourself to only 4 users it makes equally sense to concentrate on Windows and Unix users because that are the backgrounds new users come from (Windows users: new to Linux, Unix users: *much* more likely to start using GNOME than a Windows user).
Yes but the usability advantage due to the "improvement" of saving 2in of mouse movement is by far outweighed by the sheer stupidity of annoying 95% of the potential users (I seriously doubt I would switch to GNOME if I had OS X so I assume most people come from a Windows background) and all of the existing users that also use other Linux applications (I don't know anyone who doesn't mix [his DE of choice] with [the enemy] and [other X11 appliciations]).
You can't tell me that it's better to have applications adhereing to different button orders than to have the possibly (I still think the advantage of being able to read left->right compensates for the fact that the button isn't in the lower right corner) inferior solution to offer a more consistent desktop
The canon explanation was that on your way to Kessel you pass a black hole. The faster your ship the closer to the black hole you can get (all afaik and iirc)
In my experience xine skips less if you've got enough power to play it without framedrops (long version: xine is threaded, mplayer not, mplayer is slightly faster and if you're system's only good enough to play with framedrops mplayer produces less but if your system is capable of playing the video-stream xine is smoother because mplayer has skips when one frame is especially cpu intensive while the threaded architecture of xine can compensate)
Both have linearblend deinterlacing and inverse telecine (if you've got the horsepower and mplayer - xine has it but it's shitty in the post-1.0rc2 versions =/ ) which beats the crap out of the deinterlacing of PowerDVD - in fact all Windows players I've seen have deinterlacing so bad I wonder what I'm (and my friends - all versions came with different graphic cards, DVD-Roms etc) paying them for.
No it isn't because it was just a preliminary voting on the draft of the directive. The text first has to be translated into all official languages of the EU before there can be a final vote but normally that just confirms what the preliminary voting said.
BTW even if the decision of the first voting is confirmed it's not law because first there has to be a second reading in parliament if that votes against patents (again) the council has to vote for unanimously in a second voting or find a compromise with parliament (look for the/. news about the Dutch thingy in that thread was a good explanation of the whole procedure)
If there is one thing in this world where we'll never see a shortage it's silly prefixes:
Konqueror, aKregator, amaroK
Gimp, Galeon, Gaim
Enlightenment, Evidence, Entrance
GNU/Linux, GNU-Chess, the GNU/Hurd (notice the "the" - never without or RMS will come and get you)
MS Windows, MS Word, Windows Media Player (before you ask what's so funny about them: the problem is that MS always takes a generic term adds their prefix and then sues the rest of the world for trademark violation)
Google has an impressive cluster but it's optimized for storage and parallel page access.
I don't think that you could use google's cluster to compute 42 without distributing the work by hand over the different servers because it wasn't built to do calculations but to answer page requests distributed over the different units and to be able to access the most complete mirror of today's web
This is what keeps the Church of Scientology out of Germany, incidentally. They have every right to ban religions that are not state recognized, it's not like the US.
Huh? What are you smoking?
CoS isn't banned it just isn't recognised as religion either (they're considered a company instead) and they were under surveillance for some years but iirc that has been stopped.
Now about the C in CSU/CDU. After the German unification in 1871 the Catholics were a minority mostly confined to non-Prussian states and Bismarck tried to keep them down and out of German institutions. The Catholic Zentrum was formed as a counterweight and was one of the major political parties of the 2nd Reich and Weimar Republic but had more or less lost its religious roots in the end. After WWII in fear of socialists and fascists the conservatives decided to form a united (the U in CDU/CSU) conservative party and they called it Christian to distinguish it from the Catholic Zentrum
But in reality they are a small, local party with an inflated sense of importance.
I don't want to disturb your little rant but the CSU holds a quarter of the seats of CDU/CSU in Bundestag. Actually they've got more seats than the Greens or the FDP and are the 3rd biggest party in Germany.
Doesn't change the fact that they're a nuisance but that's still better than the SPD which is an embarrassment =) (Before you ask, I voted Greens in the last elections)
Opera not only saves all the windows and tabs but also the history of each page, your position on that page etc.
It's like you never restarted which is a great feature because I use lots of tabs and when I want to play a game (the main reason for booting Windows) I have to get rid of the browser to limit memory consumption
Huh? Generally speaking, maximizing volume and minimizing surface area is more a matter of shape and is independent of scale. A cube has a 6:1 area-to-volume ratio no matter what size it is. There are other engineering factors that affect the size of a reactor core (you want your fuel to be packed desnely enough to react but not so dense that it can't be controlled), but I don't see how this is one of them.
The problem with fission reactors is that you have much extremly dangerous material around and hope that nothing goes wrong. You can make it as save as possible but judging from human history Chernobyl won't remain the only catastrophe and if something goes really wrong in a fission reactor it goes *really* wrong. 500 years ago Europe had just left the middle ages behind and had discovered America. In 500 years the region around Chernobyl will be once again safe for human settlement. That's a hell of a timeframe and I don't even talk about nuclear waste. Had the first homo sapiens built a fission reactor we'd still have that stuff around and radiating
Actually there isn't a law stating that you can't sell Mein Kampf. It's just that Bavaria is the legal heir of Adolf Hitler and therefore holds the copyright and only allows some annotated editions IIRC. When the copyright expires in 2015 there's nothing the German government can do about it.
It's illegal to start an offensive war which is probably what your friends meant. (Nice law of course it was conveniently forgotten when Germany took part in the Kosovo war which arguably was an offensive war regardless how just or necessary but I digress)
The reason they translated it that way in German Risk was simply to sound more politically correct and I doubt they would still do it today.
That said I actually like "liberate". Noone has conquered anyone for at least 50 years. The Soviets liberated the suppressed workers from the fascist imperialist regimes. The West liberated the suppressed peoples from Soviet tyranny. Even better I doubt there was a single declaration of war in that time. Liberate sounds just like the word to use if you had to tell your voters that you are out to conquer the world. "My fellow Blues. The evil Reds, Greens, etc. have left us no choice. They want to destroy us and oppress and torture the poor people living there. We must liberate Redany, Greenistan, etc." =)
Just to support your views about the Byzantine bureaucracy with all its failures.
But I nevertheless think that will get better when the EP gets more power simply because someone will notice that they still exist =)
Strong Statists generally support a larger bureaucracy, Libertarian types are not favoring more government. From that point on, polarized debates turn into a fight.
That was probably my longest posting on any forum - I really should archive this thread before it vanishes in the deeps of/.
On the other hand Libertarians generally are in favor of local solutions to local problems and national solutions to national problems which means they prefer additional government in the form of city administrations, districts, states etc which all adds more layers of government
My observation is that the nation-state is the only historically proven viable way to tackle governments. Every attempt made to create a form of government contrary to the nation-state principle failed. Nation-state have numerous flaws as a system, but the alternatives (empires and clan/tribe feodality) are even messier and less desirable.
The question is what is a nation state? Britain has some rather distinct groups and the Scots wouldn't have been happy to share their country with the English some centuries ago, the same can be said of Bavarians and the rest of the Germans. On the other hand there's no real reason Austrians and Germans shouldn't share a nation state they haven't been together since the HRE became a joke about 600 years ago but Southern Germans are generally more similar to Austrians in language, opinions and mindset than to people from Hamburg or Berlin.
There's also the question about how much power should lie with the central government and how much independence remains for the different subdivisions
There is much room for different levels and the real question is "what makes a nation state". I think it's a diffuse feeling of belonging together which exists and at the same time doesn't exist in the EU. If you look at surveys there are definitly "Europeans" contrary to e.g "Americans" even at the height of the Iraq crisis when all of Britain hated France (it wasn't felt as strongly on the other side perhaps but there was a deep feeling of distrust of British/American warmongering) a general survey about opinions to a broad spectrum of questions (abortion, freedom, health care etc) showed that French and British agreed in 80% while British and Americans agreed only in 40% of all cases (I'm sorry it's been quite some time since then and I don't have a link so I won't hold it against you if you don't believe me =). At the same time there are still the old resentiments which is hardly surprising as probably a third of the Europeans living today still remember WWII and the whole aftermath and the EU in the form that there's a real question "what is the EU" only exists for perhaps 20 years.
IMHO if the EU survives the next 50 years (no matter in what form specifically as long as it isn't a UN-like powerless non-entity - just for the record I think the UN has many advantages and its mere existance today shows that it's something worth keeping but if it doesn't have one thing then it is power =) then the question for members won't be to stay or to leave but how to reform the EU to make it better simply because there'll be the same feeling of belonging to something. Or to come back to my example of Bavaria. Bavaria had been independent for more or less 700 years when it joined Germany in 1871 and many people weren't all that happy when they did it. In the first few years and both after WWI and WWII there was the question of seceding and every time there was less support and the actual proposal was taken less serious. Bavarians and Germans of course had many things in common in 1871 but there was still a lot of animosity, jealousy and mistrust f
Argh, I thought I had replied but apparently I closed the window with the preview before actually posting, so this will be the short version of my original reply; sorry if it sounds rude sometimes, it wasn't my intention
If you want accountable people, you need direct representation, as you point out. But directly elected people are not going to be loyal to the EU, they are going to be loyal to their voters.
If that were the case MPs of different countries couldn't be loyal to their country. In fact most MPs are loyal to their voters, their origins (i.e. they come from a agricultural, teaching etc background), lobby groups which pay them (everything's perfectly legal of course), their countries and sometimes their conscience - not necessarily in that order. It's in the best interest of national governments to bash the EU and blame it for unpopular the decisions where they chickened out (cough GM-food cough) while it's in the best interest of MEPs to act as a counterweight in public because they work for the EU and not the national governments
As for the constitution currenly under work, the drafts I have seen are a model of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo as well as a catalog of empty formulas and devout wishes without substance (thanks largely to French former prez Giscard d'Estaing whose style permeates the document).
Yes but if we had the perfect constitution some members of the convent dreamed of (most of them were MEPs which seems to support the point I tried to make above) the council would never agree. In fact the constitution is a very big improvement over the catastrophe of treaties, agreements, amendments and exceptions we have now. It's not perfect but what compromise ever is (the US constitution is in many respects hardly better - remember the part about slaves or ambiguities about rights and restrictions of states and feds)
The drafts that are circulating are no a good omen of the EU to come. I am really afraid that the EU is sinking into a bureaucratic morass and betraying its ideals.
The EU is in that morass and the draft is a sign that they are able to get out of it. AIS it's not perfect but it's a good start
Also, there is a whole debate around the idea of a European constitution. Under the term of several national constitutions, for instance, it's a betrayal to even consider transfering the authority endowed by to voters to another body.
For the most part the constitution would only rephrase and clarify things already hammered out in different treaties. So it's nothing new. Also it may be called constitution but it's only a treaty between sovereign States. They can simply stop to obey the EU.
Especially a body not elected by your voters.
That would change
"The EU was designed as a tyranny of the Enlightened, unfortunately, nincompoops are now in control."
The EU had many problems in the past (e.g. de Gaulle barring the UK from joining) but they tend to be forgotten in favor of the historic moments. If it doesn't go down the drain I doubt that we'll remember the bitching and bickering in 1 or 2 decades but the Euro, Schengen and the EU enlargement
Btw. it's really nice to have a discussion about the EU that doesn't devolve into a flamewar in posting #2 =)
Slashdot Mirror
AFAIK the minimum was about 50 (a good deal of the bigger cinemas have that many (generally about 10 larger speakers at the sides with a great number of small ones around and between them) even if they can't be controlled independently.)
Now despite having that many speakers you still have the sweet spot problem and that's where the wave field synthesis comes in. You replicate the real wave field of a sound (or emulate a bigger distance between the 5,6,7 channels you have today for a WFS-for-the-poor) and therefore it's just like if the helicopter crashed really 10 feet in front of you because the sound waves of such a hypothetical crash are simulated perfectly. The people at the left won't think it crashed on their left because the left speakers had some small echo but they're so much closer to that speakers, no they'll still think it crashed in front of them because of WFS. The more speakers you have the closer the sweet spot extends to the walls before you leave the simulated wave field.
erm, especially because precedent is so important in the US legal system it makes sense to look whether there've been similar cases elsewhere and if their findings are valid and applicable in the US
The US legal system is quite unique in the world. Europe has turned into a collection of Social Democracies. The US has a Constitution built on individual, not social rights and responsibilities
This has absolutely nothing to do with this case.
Clearly these two are at odds and provide the very framework of our respective legal systems.
No they don't. The weak social security framework in the US has no impact on copyright law. Actually it has no impact whatsoever on most aspects of the legal system. The most important difference between common law and code napoleon style law is that a man with a red flag has to walk in front of a car driven by a woman in portland (or somewhere else, don't remember).
he didn't want to that usability guys dragged him kicking and screaming to their test pc, really =)
RTFA they tested a unix guy who was *new* *to* *GNOME*
While having people from different backgrounds makes sense if you limit yourself to only 4 users it makes equally sense to concentrate on Windows and Unix users because that are the backgrounds new users come from (Windows users: new to Linux, Unix users: *much* more likely to start using GNOME than a Windows user).
You can't tell me that it's better to have applications adhereing to different button orders than to have the possibly (I still think the advantage of being able to read left->right compensates for the fact that the button isn't in the lower right corner) inferior solution to offer a more consistent desktop
i hate what our society is becoming.
Gratulation that's called "growing up" =)That's what you get when you have the habit of rearranging your sentences while being in the middle of writing them...
if someone still invitates:
nutshell (at) web (dot) de
The canon explanation was that on your way to Kessel you pass a black hole. The faster your ship the closer to the black hole you can get (all afaik and iirc)
It's Software- und System-Entwicklung therefore SuSE and not SSuE - SSuE would be the acronym for SCO Shitty Unix Enterprises
Both have linearblend deinterlacing and inverse telecine (if you've got the horsepower and mplayer - xine has it but it's shitty in the post-1.0rc2 versions =/ ) which beats the crap out of the deinterlacing of PowerDVD - in fact all Windows players I've seen have deinterlacing so bad I wonder what I'm (and my friends - all versions came with different graphic cards, DVD-Roms etc) paying them for.
And it looks like I was wrong. If the parliament rejects it a second time it's dead
No it isn't because it was just a preliminary voting on the draft of the directive. The text first has to be translated into all official languages of the EU before there can be a final vote but normally that just confirms what the preliminary voting said.
BTW even if the decision of the first voting is confirmed it's not law because first there has to be a second reading in parliament if that votes against patents (again) the council has to vote for unanimously in a second voting or find a compromise with parliament (look for the /. news about the Dutch thingy in that thread was a good explanation of the whole procedure)
Konqueror, aKregator, amaroK
Gimp, Galeon, Gaim
Enlightenment, Evidence, Entrance
GNU/Linux, GNU-Chess, the GNU/Hurd (notice the "the" - never without or RMS will come and get you)
MS Windows, MS Word, Windows Media Player (before you ask what's so funny about them: the problem is that MS always takes a generic term adds their prefix and then sues the rest of the world for trademark violation)
iCal, iTunes, iPod, iMac
eBusiness, eMac, eSomething
X-Chat, XSnow, Xdvi
there's much more if you just look for it
Does anyone have a link which doesn't need passport?
Google has an impressive cluster but it's optimized for storage and parallel page access.
I don't think that you could use google's cluster to compute 42 without distributing the work by hand over the different servers because it wasn't built to do calculations but to answer page requests distributed over the different units and to be able to access the most complete mirror of today's web
Huh? What are you smoking?
CoS isn't banned it just isn't recognised as religion either (they're considered a company instead) and they were under surveillance for some years but iirc that has been stopped.
Now about the C in CSU/CDU. After the German unification in 1871 the Catholics were a minority mostly confined to non-Prussian states and Bismarck tried to keep them down and out of German institutions. The Catholic Zentrum was formed as a counterweight and was one of the major political parties of the 2nd Reich and Weimar Republic but had more or less lost its religious roots in the end. After WWII in fear of socialists and fascists the conservatives decided to form a united (the U in CDU/CSU) conservative party and they called it Christian to distinguish it from the Catholic Zentrum
I don't want to disturb your little rant but the CSU holds a quarter of the seats of CDU/CSU in Bundestag. Actually they've got more seats than the Greens or the FDP and are the 3rd biggest party in Germany.
Doesn't change the fact that they're a nuisance but that's still better than the SPD which is an embarrassment =) (Before you ask, I voted Greens in the last elections)
It's like you never restarted which is a great feature because I use lots of tabs and when I want to play a game (the main reason for booting Windows) I have to get rid of the browser to limit memory consumption
s=1m; area=6m^2; volume=1m^3; area/volume=6m
s=10m; area=600m^2; volume=1000m^3; area/volume=3/5m;
area/volume=(6/s)m^2
Come back after you've passed 7th (?) grade.
The problem with fission reactors is that you have much extremly dangerous material around and hope that nothing goes wrong. You can make it as save as possible but judging from human history Chernobyl won't remain the only catastrophe and if something goes really wrong in a fission reactor it goes *really* wrong. 500 years ago Europe had just left the middle ages behind and had discovered America. In 500 years the region around Chernobyl will be once again safe for human settlement. That's a hell of a timeframe and I don't even talk about nuclear waste. Had the first homo sapiens built a fission reactor we'd still have that stuff around and radiating
Actually there isn't a law stating that you can't sell Mein Kampf. It's just that Bavaria is the legal heir of Adolf Hitler and therefore holds the copyright and only allows some annotated editions IIRC. When the copyright expires in 2015 there's nothing the German government can do about it.
The reason they translated it that way in German Risk was simply to sound more politically correct and I doubt they would still do it today.
That said I actually like "liberate". Noone has conquered anyone for at least 50 years. The Soviets liberated the suppressed workers from the fascist imperialist regimes. The West liberated the suppressed peoples from Soviet tyranny. Even better I doubt there was a single declaration of war in that time. Liberate sounds just like the word to use if you had to tell your voters that you are out to conquer the world. "My fellow Blues. The evil Reds, Greens, etc. have left us no choice. They want to destroy us and oppress and torture the poor people living there. We must liberate Redany, Greenistan, etc." =)
Just to support your views about the Byzantine bureaucracy with all its failures.
But I nevertheless think that will get better when the EP gets more power simply because someone will notice that they still exist =)
Strong Statists generally support a larger bureaucracy, Libertarian types are not favoring more government. From that point on, polarized debates turn into a fight.
That was probably my longest posting on any forum - I really should archive this thread before it vanishes in the deeps of /.
On the other hand Libertarians generally are in favor of local solutions to local problems and national solutions to national problems which means they prefer additional government in the form of city administrations, districts, states etc which all adds more layers of government
My observation is that the nation-state is the only historically proven viable way to tackle governments. Every attempt made to create a form of government contrary to the nation-state principle failed. Nation-state have numerous flaws as a system, but the alternatives (empires and clan/tribe feodality) are even messier and less desirable.
The question is what is a nation state? Britain has some rather distinct groups and the Scots wouldn't have been happy to share their country with the English some centuries ago, the same can be said of Bavarians and the rest of the Germans. On the other hand there's no real reason Austrians and Germans shouldn't share a nation state they haven't been together since the HRE became a joke about 600 years ago but Southern Germans are generally more similar to Austrians in language, opinions and mindset than to people from Hamburg or Berlin.
There's also the question about how much power should lie with the central government and how much independence remains for the different subdivisions
There is much room for different levels and the real question is "what makes a nation state". I think it's a diffuse feeling of belonging together which exists and at the same time doesn't exist in the EU. If you look at surveys there are definitly "Europeans" contrary to e.g "Americans" even at the height of the Iraq crisis when all of Britain hated France (it wasn't felt as strongly on the other side perhaps but there was a deep feeling of distrust of British/American warmongering) a general survey about opinions to a broad spectrum of questions (abortion, freedom, health care etc) showed that French and British agreed in 80% while British and Americans agreed only in 40% of all cases (I'm sorry it's been quite some time since then and I don't have a link so I won't hold it against you if you don't believe me =). At the same time there are still the old resentiments which is hardly surprising as probably a third of the Europeans living today still remember WWII and the whole aftermath and the EU in the form that there's a real question "what is the EU" only exists for perhaps 20 years.
IMHO if the EU survives the next 50 years (no matter in what form specifically as long as it isn't a UN-like powerless non-entity - just for the record I think the UN has many advantages and its mere existance today shows that it's something worth keeping but if it doesn't have one thing then it is power =) then the question for members won't be to stay or to leave but how to reform the EU to make it better simply because there'll be the same feeling of belonging to something. Or to come back to my example of Bavaria. Bavaria had been independent for more or less 700 years when it joined Germany in 1871 and many people weren't all that happy when they did it. In the first few years and both after WWI and WWII there was the question of seceding and every time there was less support and the actual proposal was taken less serious. Bavarians and Germans of course had many things in common in 1871 but there was still a lot of animosity, jealousy and mistrust f
If you want accountable people, you need direct representation, as you point out. But directly elected people are not going to be loyal to the EU, they are going to be loyal to their voters.
If that were the case MPs of different countries couldn't be loyal to their country. In fact most MPs are loyal to their voters, their origins (i.e. they come from a agricultural, teaching etc background), lobby groups which pay them (everything's perfectly legal of course), their countries and sometimes their conscience - not necessarily in that order. It's in the best interest of national governments to bash the EU and blame it for unpopular the decisions where they chickened out (cough GM-food cough) while it's in the best interest of MEPs to act as a counterweight in public because they work for the EU and not the national governments
As for the constitution currenly under work, the drafts I have seen are a model of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo as well as a catalog of empty formulas and devout wishes without substance (thanks largely to French former prez Giscard d'Estaing whose style permeates the document).
Yes but if we had the perfect constitution some members of the convent dreamed of (most of them were MEPs which seems to support the point I tried to make above) the council would never agree. In fact the constitution is a very big improvement over the catastrophe of treaties, agreements, amendments and exceptions we have now. It's not perfect but what compromise ever is (the US constitution is in many respects hardly better - remember the part about slaves or ambiguities about rights and restrictions of states and feds)
The drafts that are circulating are no a good omen of the EU to come. I am really afraid that the EU is sinking into a bureaucratic morass and betraying its ideals.
The EU is in that morass and the draft is a sign that they are able to get out of it. AIS it's not perfect but it's a good start
Also, there is a whole debate around the idea of a European constitution. Under the term of several national constitutions, for instance, it's a betrayal to even consider transfering the authority endowed by to voters to another body.
For the most part the constitution would only rephrase and clarify things already hammered out in different treaties. So it's nothing new. Also it may be called constitution but it's only a treaty between sovereign States. They can simply stop to obey the EU.
Especially a body not elected by your voters.
That would change
"The EU was designed as a tyranny of the Enlightened, unfortunately, nincompoops are now in control."
The EU had many problems in the past (e.g. de Gaulle barring the UK from joining) but they tend to be forgotten in favor of the historic moments. If it doesn't go down the drain I doubt that we'll remember the bitching and bickering in 1 or 2 decades but the Euro, Schengen and the EU enlargement
Btw. it's really nice to have a discussion about the EU that doesn't devolve into a flamewar in posting #2 =)